Why we need to choose connection over fear

You can read the original TED Countdown Linkedin Blog Post here.

For 25 years, my work has been about building bridges between people.

In 2001, I founded Leaders’ Quest on a simple but radical idea: the most powerful way to learn is through direct experience. We invite people from different backgrounds to spend time together and look at life from a different point of view — visiting factory workers in China, coal miners in Appalachia and farmers in Kenya. We bring together business leaders, scientists, students, entrepreneurs and artists and invite them to reflect anew: what matters to you?

The goal was to spark empathy. To see something you can’t unsee and be changed by it. To make different choices about what really matters and how to lead. And it worked for the most part. Still today I often receive messages recounting how an experience on a Quest changed the trajectory of a person’s life.

But right now, I am in the midst of a kind of crisis of faith. Not in a religious sense, but in the sense of something fundamental unraveling. I look at my trust in the best of human nature and wonder if it isn’t hopelessly naive. We’re living through a period in which many of the structures that once held societies together are fracturing.

Trust is declining across governments, media and even between individuals. Information flows at a scale and speed that makes it almost impossible to distinguish signal from noise, and in that environment, misinformation spreads with extraordinary force.

Rather than face up to the breakdown of many of the systems we’ve historically relied on, it’s tempting to find someone to blame or to fall into magical thinking. The result is the ‘othering’ of different groups in society and a rise in populist politics in which each opposing camp is increasingly certain of its own coherence and the other’s distortion.

In that atmosphere, curiosity becomes a luxury. There is less room, and often less willingness, to lean into the experience of someone else — particularly someone positioned as “other,” whether geographically distant or simply socially or politically misaligned. The world, in all its complexity and richness, shrinks.

At the same time, many people have a pervasive sense of uncertainty about the future. Climate change, geopolitical conflict, economic volatility, technological disruption. Under these conditions, fear is not an aberration; it’s a rational response to a chaotic world. The instinct to protect what is close — to focus on your family, your livelihood, your immediate security — becomes a form of adaptation.

A friend of mine, Hiba Qasas , works as a peacebuilder in war-affected regions. Her observation is stark: in situations of acute insecurity, self-interest precedes empathy. Not because people lack compassion, but because survival demands it. It’s easy to be empathetic from a place of safety. It’s much harder when you’re unsure whether you’ll have a job tomorrow, or whether your children are safe.

That observation has stuck with me, because it complicates something I’ve long taken for granted.

If empathy depends on a baseline level of security, then what happens in a world where that sense of security is eroding? And if fear narrows the radius of moral concern, then perhaps the more urgent question is how to reduce the conditions in which fear becomes dominant.

As I was going through a box of old papers last week, I came across an article I wrote in 2015 about the gap between cleverness and wisdom.

“Intellectually, scientifically, humanity is in the midst of  a period of radical change. After thousands of years  progressing at a relatively modest pace, we’ve accelerated  in an extraordinary fashion with the graphs that plot all of this literally shooting off the page. But where are we in terms of emotional development, ethics and spiritual growth? What happens when we stick these on a graph and plot our  evolution over time? One great challenge we face today – and the source of much of the dis-ease that people often feel – is the huge disparity between our intellectual capacity and our emotional, ethical and spiritual growth. In a world of  eight, nine, ten billion people, wisdom, not cleverness, will determine our collective fate.”

Casting a new light

Re-reading my thoughts from 11 years ago casts a new light today. We’ve extended our reach into extraordinary domains: We can model climate systems, map genomes, simulate economies and transmit information instantaneously across the globe. It’s tempting to understand polarization as a political failure alone, but it also feels like a symptom of this deeper gap: between technical sophistication and emotional integration, between information abundance and how we make sense of it.

We’re living through a period of extraordinary and compounding change. There is no shame in responding to that strain by focusing on what is closest: family, community and even survival. We become stuck when our circle of concern closes so completely that connection beyond it feels irrelevant or impossible.

There is no magic solution to the challenges of the modern world. But alongside the forces of division, I’ve also witnessed a growing and spreading awareness that something needs to change. That the systems we’ve inherited are not producing the outcomes we need and continuing in the same direction will deepen the crises we’re already facing.

It leaves us with a different kind of question than the one I started with. Not simply how to build empathy, but how to create the conditions in which empathy can survive. Not only how to encourage connection, but how to reduce the fear that makes connection feel like a risk. Facing that fear together — and building bridges with one another in spite of it — is essential to creating the future so many of us dream of.

In the weeks leading up to London Climate Action Week in June, I’ll be sharing a series of reflections on what I've learned — and what I’ve had to unlearn — about the gap between cleverness and wisdom.

After Climate Week, we’ll open this series up to voices from across the Countdown ecosystem — leaders, practitioners and thinkers doing this work on the ground. In the meantime, here’s a look at what we’ve been building together over the past five years at Countdown, and where we’re heading next.